Unnamable The Ends of Asian American Art

Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, the author challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation for marginalized artists to enter into the canon. Pressing critically on how the politics of visibility and recognition reduces artworks by Asian American artists to narrow parameters of categorization, this work reconceives Asian American art not as a subset of objects, but as a discursive medium that sets up the conditions for a politics to occur. By approaching Asian American art in this way, the author refigures the way we see Asian American art as an oppositional practice, less in terms of its aspirations to be seen than in terms of how it models a different way of seeing and encountering the world. Uniquely presented, the chapters are organized thematically as mini-exhibitions, and offer readings of select works by contemporary artists including Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Simon Leung, Mary Lum, and Nikki S. Lee. Inspired above all by their art practice, the author argues for an alternative approach to exhibition making and methods of reading that conceives of these works not as "exemplary" instances of Asian American art, but as engaged in an aesthetic practice that remains open-ended, challenging the assumptions that racialize artists within an "Asian American" context. In this book, the author insists that in order to reassess Asian American art beyond its place in art history, she suggests the possible need to let go not only of established viewing and curatorial practices, but even the category of Asian American art itself.